Has anyone here heard of this? The local thrift store has had a huge pile of them for months, and I finally picked it up. It's dated 1997, by a company called Cyberdigital, but I couldn't find much of anything on the web about it. Any ideas on what it is?

Kitsune Sniper

04-24-2011, 06:12 PM

Are you sure it's not a shareware release with a different name?

Also, this thread (http://www.pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=1125) at a Keen fan forum says it might be a poker game - maybe an alternate box version of Jazz Jackrabbit's Poker Broker.

I'd love to get a copy though!

NaturalChemical

04-24-2011, 06:20 PM

*laughs*

200 dollars on Ebay? They're $1.29 a piece out here. Anyway, it could be anything - shareware, doujin, repackaged games under another name. I'll post back here once I get it running.

Kitsune Sniper

04-24-2011, 06:49 PM

I would suggest buying them all out, listing one on auction on eBay, and see how people react. You might be sitting on a goldmine.

I still want one before you do that!

Sneak613

04-24-2011, 06:54 PM

I'm not sure if it's the same series, or game, but I remember the "Commander Keen" games from when I was a kid. I think there were like 6 or 7 sequels for it. I believe they were made by "Apogee Software". Decent EGA side-scroller for it's time for the PC. One of the better "shareware" games I remembered.

...I see there is a wikipedia page about it (at least the ones I remember): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen

NaturalChemical

04-24-2011, 07:47 PM

Alright, now that I have some pics I'll give a bit of a rundown on what exactly this is. Apologies for the size of the images - didn't have the means to resize them at the moment.

First we have the box itself (http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/7541/backnp.jpg). Note the text on the bottom that mentions Kirk; I didn't think anything of it at first. The disc (http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/3790/discm.jpg) came wrapped in plastic inside a cardboard sleeve, and had some light scratches as a result.

It wouldn't run on my box, so I moved to another and got it to work. You're immediately greeted by this splash screen:

http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2571/85319914.png

Yes, this is a Star Trek game. "Trek" 96 indeed. God only knows why they chose Keen to try and capitalize on years after the series' success. It also gives us a developer: J&O Software, which, based on some quick searching, is a Portuguese company with virtually no info on the internet.

In spite of this, I decided to continue to the game itself, in the hopes that it would at least be a half-assed Commander Keen clone. No such luck.

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/719/39730503.png

This is the interface. The ship you control is currently hidden behind that floating phallic space station in the middle of the screen. The buttons on the side began as being in another language, but turned into English after a couple of clicks.

That second popup, "Sensors", doesn't do a damn thing but display the name and sprite of any other ship you click on. Fortunately you won't have to worry about that, because as you fly around aimlessly all the ships quickly vanish, and because the "starmap" on the right side doesn't work, you'll never find them again.

After a while I was able to get the Warp slider to work, and flew around at much faster speeds for 20 seconds or so, when this happened:

http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/8290/28000521.png

...and the game promptly closed. That screen was easily the highlight of the game.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Kitsune Sniper

04-24-2011, 09:26 PM

Well, for one thing, you've just solved one of the greatest mysteries related to Keen lore.

Second, this appears to be a clone of WinTrek (http://www.mobygames.com/game/wintrek) - or maybe WinTrek is a clone of this, I dunno. There's actually several games (http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/star-trek-variants) with this same game mode... enough to warrant a MobyGames group. So who knows.

I googled a bit and found this post from Tweak3d (http://www.tweak3d.net/forums/showthread.php?56199-Commander-Keens-Trek-96) which mentions a guy that found out the same things you did, more or less. ;)

Also those names in the bootup screen are definitely not Brazilian.

NaturalChemical

04-25-2011, 10:29 PM

Huh, interesting that both myself and that other guy found this at Salvation Army thrift shops. Strange how that happens.

It's also neat to know that the developer had at least started to base the game on something interesting; from the looks of it, Trek 96 is a terrible clone of WinTrek that went unfinished. A crap game, certainly, but a neat piece to have.